3. Simple backups

[status: barely started]

3.1. Motivation and plan

Backups are arguably the most important thing in running a system.

Sometimes your system will come with a backup mechanism, but it’s not clear that you will understand how it all works. This procedure has very good control over where your backups are placed.

3.2. Procedure

One line setup, one line backup – just one directory at this time.

## setup
IMPORTANT_DIR=$HOME/Documents   ## or whatever you want to start with
mkdir ~/rdiff

## every time you want to back up (i.e. daily):
rdiff-backup -v 5 $IMPORTANT_DIR ~/rdiff/$IMPORTANT_DIR

To examine what you have:

## list what's available
rdiff-backup --list-increments ~/rdiff/$IMPORTANT_DIR

To show how you can accumulate more incrementals:

date --iso=seconds
date --iso=seconds >> ~/Documents/timestamps
rdiff-backup -v 5 $IMPORTANT_DIR ~/rdiff/$IMPORTANT_DIR
date --iso=seconds >> ~/Documents/timestamps
rdiff-backup -v 5 $IMPORTANT_DIR ~/rdiff/$IMPORTANT_DIR
date --iso=seconds >> ~/Documents/timestamps
rdiff-backup -v 5 $IMPORTANT_DIR ~/rdiff/$IMPORTANT_DIR

## this has created some more incremental backups; let's check them out:
rdiff-backup --list-increments ~/rdiff/$IMPORTANT_DIR

## You should see an output that looks like this:

Found 2 increments:
  increments.2016-12-21T15:03:34-07:00.dir   Wed Dec 21 15:03:34  2016
  increments.2016-12-21T15:03:57-07:00.dir   Wed Dec 21 15:03:57  2016
Current mirror: Wed Dec 21 15:04:08 2016

To sync this to an off-site location. NOTE: this is not yet the encrypted approach, so do not send private data with this method yet.

YOUR_SERVER=my_server_hostname
YOUR_REMOTE_LOGIN=$LOGNAME
rsync -avz --delete ~/rdiff/ $YOUR_REMOTE_LOGIN@$YOUR_SERVER:rdiff